Teen declared they were trans and now says they can't be in contact with us

[crochetedcat]

As the title says really, I'll try to keep this brief but obviously it's complicated.

DS went to university and within a few weeks of being there declared he was now trans and had a new name. We were all rather confused as this seemed out of the blue at 18. He is autistic but seemed happy and doing well, good course, plans for the future etc. I've kept using 'he' here for clarity.

We decided to jointly take the approach to be supportive and to focus on everything else, didn't question it, carried on as usual. I was very aware that challenging it would not go down well, especially when at uni with potentially lots of people saying how awful we were for asking any questions at all. So we decided to take the 'thanks for telling us dear, that's great, how's uni going' approach.

Tbh there was very little change apart from when they came home for a visit in November they were wearing a bit of make up and had made changes to voice and mannerisms. This was difficult to deal with as it felt like the concept of being female was being stereotyped but again, we didn't react and continued to support. He happily went back off to uni after a few days of seeing family etc.

Christmas was the same. He came home for a week but was fairly distant. But we continued being positive and asking about course, friends etc etc - everything you would usually do. No one questioned anything and just rolled with it. The key point here is we have all been as accepting as possible, no one has said anything even vaguely negative, lots of enthusiasm about uni and life more broadly.

Then early in the New Year, we got a message that we were all clearly embarrassed by him and there would be no more contact ever again. It felt ludicrous tbh. The day before we'd been chatting on WhatsApp about his course and something I'd been reading. I responded asking where this had come from, that we weren't embarrassed and would support him in whatever. He said ok and asked about the dog as she'd needed to go to the vet. A completely unemotional reaction really to having just declared he'd never see his family again.

However I haven't heard from him since. He ignores all messages including asking him if he's ok. This was nearly 3 weeks ago. He's not great at responding to messages but would usually do so in a day or two even if just an emoji.

I am guessing the accusations that we are unsupportive are about his anxieties. Or wanting the drama of no one supporting him. It feels very similar to 'the script' of the cheating husband where history is rewritten to fit the narrative.

I also assume the wanting to cut contact is due to him feeling uncomfortable in his 'old life' because it's confronting and now his new normal where probably everyone is effusive.

I would bet money on new friends / the internet driving this.

But it feels so unreal and I don't know what to do next. Is it serious? Is he just never going to have contact with us again? Do I just remain supportive and sending him photos of the dog and articles I see about climate science and including him on the family groups, he hasn't left those yet?

I'm of course angry that someone could just send a message like that to his mother with no feeling. And upset. And scared etc etc

And then there's the minor fact I'm financially supporting him through university. I'm paying for the phone contract for the phone he used to tell me he was never going to see me again. Is he assuming I'll carry on sending him £700 a month to cover his uni halls costs whilst he declares he's estranged?! It feels like a younger teen yelling that they hate you and then asking what's for dinner and can they have a lift to town.

At a loss really and not sure where to go from here to have the most sensible outcome.

Thank you.

And echoes my point that it's not about your behaviour. It's about his avoidant behaviour trying to run away from his past.

This is not a demonstration of good mental health.

You are not the problem and nothing you do will make this better. You are a reminder of his sex, even if you were the most perfect and most rainbow of parents and that's what the problem is. Not how accepting you are.

Your strategy needs to be about the long game beyond university for this reason. Pushing him now, is liable to have a negative effect and as much as you want to 'save him', he's an adult and there is only so much you can do.

You have to deal with the point that his mistakes are his to make and his to learn from. He just needs to know that you will always be there to pick up the pieces should you need to.

But he is allowed to make bad decisions. That's ok.

You mean those gender clinics which seem to repeatedly found to be working in an unethical way and outside the rules of normal healthcare practice to the point that red flags are being raised left right and centre about their conduct and their credibility?

Those clinics?

If they don't get the toxic then they aren't being as authentic in their experience as trans as their peers.

There is definitely competitive misery going on.

If you haven't suffered enough you can't be 'true trans'.

That's a huge similarity with part of the goth community in our day. Except it's been weaponised.

I haven't read the full thread yet.

I went to a talk by Dr Az Hakeem who has spent time working with gender dysphoric men and exploring why they feel that way. Only 2% of his patients go on for surgery (who have not already had it) He is very clear that Autism and transideology are closely linked.

One thing he said was that some men in his group who had transitioned and were regretting it were angry that people they trusted had not told them to truth, that they had affirmed a lie.

They wanted family members to be honest with them and challenge their thoughts because otherwise all around them people were saying it was the right decision to go on hormones/have surgery/socially transition.

Bayswater is a great support - I think it is important that you are the person that is truthful to him and tells him the reality of what he is doing.

Ritchie Herron's story is one that might have been mentioned and is quite a powerful message.

It's funny, I often say that the Trans kids of today are the Goths of the 80s and the Emos and and the self harmers of the 90s. And yes, not only weaponised but politicised.

Oh! I loved Twin Peaks but unless it's coming from a nefarious place putting it in that comment makes as much sense as a lady getting visions from a log.

I didn't bother googling it because it was too odd to bother with but, knowing now that it was from a show I used to love, I took a look. The AI roll-up sums up the general consensus on the search results well...

Meaning:
It's a stark warning to confront and rectify one's negative behaviors and motivations, or face potentially disastrous outcomes.

Context:
In the show, Gordon Cole says this to Denise when she's undercover as a male character, signifying the need for her to fully embrace her true identity and confront her past.

So its relevance to that comment is either:

a) "affirm your child's gender identity or you'll have blood on your hands because your child will commit suicide" or
b) an "affirm your child's gender identity or you'll get what's coming to you" kind of threat

FFS.

On a plus note, I should imagine the OP and pretty much every other person reading this thread has enough context to see the whole comment that it came from for exactly what it is, let alone the coercion hyperbole in that quote.

There's a lot that makes me angry about gender identity belief. Top of the pile is children and young people being harmed. A close second is the parents who love them being framed as dangerous/evil and being disempowered by institutions that should know better when trying to safeguard their own children. Randoms on the internet doing the same are irritating but it's the institutional failure that is by far the worse.

I'll counter that Twin Peaks quote with a far more apt one from parliament on 15th April:

"I have no doubt that what happened at I have no doubt that what happened at GIDS—the Gender Identity Development Service—will go down as one of the worst safeguarding and medical scandals of our generation."

Here's the debate that the quote is from:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5050831-debate-happening-in-house-of-commons-victoria-atkins-on-fire

The link in the OP on that thread was only available when live. There's a recording about 4 comments down the thread.

I am so sorry you are going through this. We are in a similar position to you (son, same age, also just started uni, also out of the blue, also ASD [and ADHD], but no dog!). We know that he is going by a girl name at uni. I didn't use the girl name at home over Christmas and it was okay but not great.
But we are a big step behind: I wish I believed in god, or something, in order that I could pray for the estrangement step to not come our way.

I am in the middle of reading the full thread (made it to page 13!). But just wanted to thank the truly thoughtful posters for your kind and carefully-considered responses. They are such a help for parents like me who are trying to understand what line to take.

For my part, I have started collecting useful notes and phrases - my notebook is bulging today thanks to the many thoughtful posters here. A friend gave me a useful thought at the beginning of September. She is nearly 80, a retired GP who has four children and more grandchildren and great grandchildren than I can count - she has seen life. Talking about my son and his autism, she casually said "it must be hard, mustn't it, feeling so different from everyone". And I found that really helpful in understanding how my son got drawn into this business. She's so right. Of course all teens are trying to work out who they are and how they feel - but for our autistic boys, they often actually are different. I'm not especially sociable myself, but I can't imagine always, permanently, being on the outside looking in. No wonder the rainbows look attractive. So I try to hold on to that thought from my friend. They are different. But they'll come back to us in their way. Hold the line that your son is loved. These things will pass. We keep the door open and the light on for our boys, to find the way back.

You sound like you have been so wonderfully caring. I am not very patient and spent Christmas biting my tongue in case I said something I regret! Oww. All best wishes to you and your family.

I know that GenderGP is dubious, unregulated, operating out of Singapore. I was referring to private gender clinics that parents use to stop their kids buying online. . Are there really red flags being raised? Can you point me in the direction of this so that I can share with HCPs who encouraged us to make an appointment and who wrongly told us that they will act cautiously due to trauma and ASD.

🎯❤️💪💐

"it must be hard, mustn't it, feeling so different from everyone". And I found that really helpful in understanding how my son got drawn into this business. She's so right. Of course all teens are trying to work out who they are and how they feel - but for our autistic boys, they often actually are different. I'm not especially sociable myself, but I can't imagine always, permanently, being on the outside looking in

ExtraordinaryMachine1 That's funny, I was literally about to post this below, when read your post, so I've taken a quote from it because it echoes perfectly what I was trying to express.

I had written:

I wonder if, as autism is such a strong overriding common denominator in trans-identifying young people, it's because they struggle to connect with their same sex peers throughout their childhoods? Perhaps similarly aged kids of the opposite sex have always gone easier on them? They don't compare themselves to them and find themselves lacking, in the way they might with their same sex peers and they feel they can approach them socially with less to lose.

Maybe rather than always be on the outside looking in at the cliques full of confident, popular kids of their own sex, they figure they'll stop trying to be the boy or the girl they are failing to be, and just reinvent themselves as someone/something else entirely.

The thing is,othese kids always had one another anyway. Quite why it took them all becoming trans to find that solidarity in each other, and acceptance of themselves, I do not know.

I know a young woman who is very much straight and female identifying, but she's always only ever had close male friends. She was the one that people always forgot to invite for a group night out. It's as if no-one really noticed whether she was there or not. For some reason she's always struggled to find her place in social groups of girls. She's had long periods of real loneliness and very little social life thorught her teens and early twenties. She has had several boyfriends, some long term, so it's not as if she can't attract other people at all, but for some reason she clearly feels less much pressure around boys than around girls, and relaxes more in the company of a group of lads. I've often felt she might be on the spectrum. She is the typical undiagnosed but constantly masking girl who gets occasionally overwhelmed by it all and struggles to regulate her emotions. She's not gay, but if she were, it's easy to imagine she'd be one of those gay girls who would find it easier to just convince herself she must really be a boy, because boys don't judge her or keep her at arm's length the way so many girls seem to have done. And boys typically communicate in a more straightfoward and less coded way than girls.

@TwigletsAndRadishes I agree with you completely.

Her son might do well to consider your advice too. If he continues to try to control his parents, he will either destroy the relationship or twist it into a parody of a healthy relationship. A healthy relationship cannot be on the basis that one party controls how the other party behaves and thinks; there has to be a degree of freedom to have different worldviews.

Your suggestion of "[taking] just one step back" and "[starting] putting the pieces together" would only "repair" the relationship at the expense of the OP's integrity - unless, of course, she was able to wholeheartedly accept her son's understanding of sex and gender. Giving up one's integrity is something no-one should be demanding.

It is sadly my experience that trans people are unwilling to try to explain their worldview in any depth. None of those whose beliefs I have heard or read have come up with a coherent philosophy of trans, and instead rely on pseudoscience, logical inconsistency, and very poorly evidenced claims - such nonsense as the genderbread person, which completely misrepresents the meaning of "spectrum" and implies false equivalence between different categories.

No, I'm not sure, but we have to 'be kind', don't we?

It's no better than a conspiracy theory when it comes down to it.

OP said he came home wearing makeup, and if he's transitioning to living as a female then of course he will need new clothes. Context is everything! 😉

And you really think that OP, who’s been trying to deal with the bewildering facts of what’s happening in a mature and sensible manner, but has been completely blindsided by a son who, out of the blue, 'just declared he'd never see his family again', could resolve his lack of contact and his abandonment of his grandmother with the cheery suggestion of a shopping-trip?

Yeah, context is everything, and I’d bet that your suggestion of retail therapy anround the make-up counter isn’t going to cut it.

Why would he need new clothes? I wear jeans and t-shirts most of the time, just as my DH does. Does that make me a man or DH a woman?

Absolutely, most of the women I know live in jeans and hoodies, certainly the young adults. Yet my autistic ROGD adolescent wears corsets even in the most inappropriate circumstances. When we try to engage in a conversation about what is appropriate, I’m told that I don’t understand - which I don’t.

Also there’s the minor issue I’ve not been on a ‘shopping trip’ and certainly not to buy make up in about 30 years. And he’s almost 19 he can buy his own clothes.

If he wants to join in my womanly activities he can come on a 10 mile muddy run with the dog in the rain.

I'm guessing that anything less than fawning "oh that's wonderful" would be taken as unsupportive.

The only thing I can think is keeping in contact through letters and periodically asking the university to check they are okay if you get no response.

Maybe address the issue more directly, say you were sorry that your actions were interpreted as unsupportive and you'd like to learn how to be supportive. Anything essentially to keep communication going/restarted. He's basically in a cult and you need the same tactics to extract him. Possibly just open support through uni, he will probably desist naturally once in the world of work. As did most of the alternative types I knew at uni.

Indeed his sister lives in hoodies and jeans (bought online as walking around shops is not therapy for us)

I think it just goes to show the facile surface skimming understanding that people have of this phenomenon that buying him a lipstick is seen as something you should do to help your relationship. If all that he needs is a lip gloss and some “girly” clothes to become a woman then why do we need puberty blockers and brutal surgery’s passed onto these young people? I think you are doing a great job navigating all of this.

I really feel for you, op. I know you don't want to do anything that increases the alienation, but your son is being a twat.
I wouldn't be funding anything that facilitates his behaviour.

So many wise and insightful posts that counter the occasional tone deaf "uncritically affirm and go on a girly shopping trip" narrative

Parents unfortunately are having to navigate all this with young people having been gaslit into believing that sex change is a viable life alternative that'll bring them happiness. Sadly precisely the opposite will be the fate for the majority where it's not a passing phase.

Presumably this shop trip would also entail supporting him using female changing rooms and coercing shop female assistants into participating in his fantasy?